Doom Generation Quotes

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn't handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation—that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter.

Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last?

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn't handle the pressure.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul. For the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe that leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

We must convince each generation that they are transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future.

It drops us into a vigorous current, a constant state of misguided control. The doomed generation takes a final step forward, ignoring all the signs that state the obvious, and leaps into a trip no drug known to man could ever encompass.

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.

They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls.

We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two. I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming “This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!” we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before. It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

Can I get to the bottle of Old Crow and mix it up with the remains of these ice fragments...a cool drink for the freak? Give the gentleman something cool, dear, can't you see he's wired his brain to the water pump and his ears to the generator...

A nation that did not organize its generations in proper relationships was doomed to disintegration.

So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life. But those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionately more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.

Our family became spelled after my ancestor pixed off two evil witch sisters. The witches’ curse was supposed to doom my great- great- great grandmother to turn evil and torch the world— except the spell wasn’t worded right. It didn’t spec-ify which Emerald princess. So ever since, all the girls in the Emerald family have been stuck inside, since there’s no way to know what generation will inherit the curse.

In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as the Empire declined.

It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.

...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased... [They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.

HUMANS don’t generate toxic wastes—but our culture certainly does. HUMANS aren’t toxic to the face of the earth—but our culture certainly is. It’s vitally important for our children to know that the curse that needs to be lifted from the earth is not humanity. It’s important for them to know that we may be a doomed culture, but we are not a doomed species. It’s important for them to understand that it’s not being HUMAN that is destroying the world. It’s living this way that is destroying the world. It’s important for them to know that humans have lived other ways, because it’s important for them to know that it’s possible to live other ways. Otherwise they can only repeat the falsehood spoken by that waste disposal engineer, that the only way to stop poisoning the world is to get rid of humanity.

The past is the tapestry from which we learn the steps we should not take,’ Verathin had said. ‘Study it, learn from it, know it. Then and only then can we hope to avoid repeating the mistakes of those who came before us. Ignore it and doom yourself to being the story the next generation learns from.

Maybe I am one of the last people in history who will feel the things I do. Maybe everything I hoped about the world, and hoped to bring about in it, is doomed to fail. Instead of learning useful things, I have filled my brain with obsolete philosophies, ideas with no more purchase or veracity than the four humors or spontaneous generations. I could say I regret it all, the useless information, but what would be the point? It’s too late now. These are the elements that make me who I am.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

The silence was doomed to be deafening, as it echoed the local hushing of a generation.

Jonny has a theory that South Africa are doomed to choke in every major tournament for the next fifty years as payment for apartheid. He also believes that England will spend centuries working off their colonial sins by performing miserably at sport. I then ask him why Australia, who wiped out generations of Aborigines, win everything in every sport, and he shuts up.

Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like "certain death" and "total failure" and the idea of a "doomed generation." But not me. I am comfortable with these themes. There is nothing new about them, except when they come all at once. Any conversation that can make smart people confront a mix of Death, Doom, and Failure with a straight face is probably worth listening in on. They don't come around real often, and when they do it almost always means that at least two of the people doing the talking are in very serious trouble.

This is a very Gandhian idea. Materialism reinforces a “paradigm of scarcity”: there is not enough to go around, so we are doomed to fight one another for ever-diminishing resources. Spiritual economics begins not from the assumed scarcity of matter but from the verifiable infinitude of consciousness. “Think of this One original source,” Plotinus said, “as a spring, self-generating, feeding all of itself to the rivers and yet not used up by them, ever at rest.” Or, as Gandhi put it, “There is enough in the world for everyone’s need; there is not enough for everyone’s greed.” The appearance of scarcity overcomes those for whom, as the Upanishad says, “the world without alone is real.” There is no scarcity of love, respect, meaning – the resources of consciousness. Such is the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads.

This was the Southeran's hush, that strange, oppressive atmosphere generated around scholarly people who want mothing more than to be left alone with books but are doomed to interact with members of the public.

Hillary—who had been the target of so much venom over the years and who had become a disciple of Obama’s data-driven campaign style—sided with a younger generation that heavily favored science over the art of politics.

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

Then the well spoke to me. It said: Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains. This is a very Gandhian idea. Materialism reinforces a “paradigm of scarcity”: there is not enough to go around, so we are doomed to fight one another for ever-diminishing resources. Spiritual economics begins not from the assumed scarcity of matter but from the verifiable infinitude of consciousness. “Think of this One original source,” Plotinus said, “as a spring, self-generating, feeding all of itself to the rivers and yet not used up by them, ever at rest.” Or, as Gandhi put it, “There is enough in the world for everyone’s need; there is not enough for everyone’s greed.” The appearance of scarcity overcomes those for whom, as the Upanishad says, “the world without alone is real.” There is no scarcity of love, respect, meaning – the resources of consciousness. Such is the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads. –M.N.

a new console generation was on the way, but analysts and pundits were predicting that console gaming was doomed thanks to the rise of iPhones and iPads. Publishers didn’t want to invest tens of millions of dollars into big games without knowing that people would actually buy the next-generation Xbox One and PS4.*

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous “recurrence of birth” a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of our self, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should indeed become the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.” This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, “discrimination.

So I shall make my tribute a plea for Keepers of the Springs, who will be faithful to their tasks. There never has been a time when there was a greater need for Keepers of the Springs, or when there were more polluted springs to be cleansed. If the home fails, the country is doomed. The breakdown of home life and influence will mark the breakdown of the nation. If the Keepers of the Springs desert their posts or are unfaithful to their responsibilities the future outlook of this country is black indeed. This generation needs Keepers of the Springs who will be courageous enough to cleanse the springs that have been polluted. It is not an easy task—nor is it a popular one, but it must be done for the sake of the children, and the young women of today must do it.

Anxiety is such a useless sentiment. It does not divert impending disasters nor does it help in preparing for them. And it is by no means an accurate portent of doom for more often than not, it signifies nothing. Anxiety simply stretches out the torment so that one feels it long before the pain strikes and ensures that if those fears prove unfounded, the afflicted person suffers nonetheless.

The male frogs called, attracting mates to lay eggs and begin another generation. Their calls seemed to be protests, an act of defiance. Even as the walls of development squeezed the life out of Texas, that life called to its doomed future, reminding anyone who would listen that it was their home, too. I listened. With a heavy heart, I wondered how anyone could call such destruction progress.

The present age is only unique because you live in it. When you die, you cease to care about that age. And you know this. Which is why you don’t care about anything past your own life. Why should you? It follows, quite reasonably, that every generation is righteous in cursing the one that precedes it. Namely, yours. And the vicious fighting withdrawal that is your own conservatism – this bitter, hate-filled war against change – is doomed to fail, because no age lasts for ever. One follows upon the next and this is an inescapable fact. So step aside. Your day is done. Any regression into childish tantrums makes a mockery of wisdom. The age dies with you, as it must, and you now show its face to be that of a mewling child who can no longer hold on to what has ceased to exist. Synthraeas

For three centuries, Black mothers have been thought to pass down to their offspring the traits that marked them as inferior to any white person. Along with this biological impairment, it is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair. A persistent objective of American social policy has been to monitor and restrain this corrupting tendency of Black motherhood. Regulating

It is, however, true that I cannot deny a sense that life for me is now mysteriously prolonged. Is it that I may have children, may cast a fling of seed wider, beyond this generation, this doom-encircled population, shuffling each other in endless competition along the street? My daughters shall come here, in other summers; my sons shall turn new fields. Hence we are not raindrops, in soon dried by the wind; we make gardens blow and forests roar; we come up differently, for ever and ever.

Bill Clinton and many of the older generation of aides and advisers, believed it was a mistake to cordon her off from large swaths of the electorate. They understood the value of slicing and dicing voters to make efficient decisions, but they also felt that Hillary should be doing more to show that she wanted every vote. Some of them believed that instead of basing her campaign on Obama’s core coalition, she should have begun with the working-class whites and Latinos who fueled her 2008 run and built out.

We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minuets we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

«Eliza opened her furry black satchel. She pulled out a portable CD player. “Gav, look here. Once, I loved this machine. Because it plays all my CDs. But nobody buys music in the stores any more! Even I don’t pay for music, and I’m rich! I’m carrying a zombie in my purse!” “Well, yes, that platform is obsolete now, but a new business model will arise for music.” “No it won’t! That’s a lie! Nobody will ever pay! The music business is the walking dead! Don’t lie to me.” Eliza stuffed her doomed device back in her furry purse. Gavin rubbed his chin. “Your Digital Native generation really has some issues.”»

Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

What plagues the US healthcare system is not universally poor outcomes, but poor outcomes for the bottom rungs of society. Low income populations and racial minorities. As with much inequalities, the factors that result in this outcome feed on one another to make the problem worse. Black Americans are less likely to be able to find a physician who will treat them. The physicians they do find are less likely to give them a needed prescription for pain relief as they are more likely to be seen as drug seekers. They are also less likely to be able to afford the prescriptions they are given, they are more likely to have unaddressed trauma, often multi-generational and childhood trauma.

Dewey mournfully remarks, “A certain tragic fate seems to attend all intellectual movements.” With no standard, no proof, anywhere in the premises, a brand of philosophy can be overthrown as easily as it can rise up. Said Thomas Huxley: Generation after generation, philosophy has been doomed to roll the stone uphill; and just as all the world swore it was at the top, down ic has rolled to the bottom again . . . until now the weight and the number of those who refuse to be the prey of verbal mystifications has begun to tell in practical life. Huxley’s grandson, Aldous, observes that philosophical arguments are mostly angry shoutings at one another by two people who use the same words but mean different things by them.

The great majority of those who came to see me belonged to the gray brotherhood of obsession, people imprisoned within a single idea, an idea not even their own but appropriated from previous generations; people like the inventors of the perpetuum mobile; weak in imagination, and trivial and absurd in their solutions. Yet even they burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure. How pitiful are these flawed geniuses, these titans of stunted spirit, crippled at birth by nature, who, as one of her grim jokes, bestowed upon their talentlessness a creative frenzy worthy of a Leonardo. Their lot in life is indifference or mockery, and all that you can do for them is listen patiently for an hour or two and nod at their monomania.

Don’t you sometimes feel a power in you?” Vollmer says. “An extreme state of good health, sort of. An arrogant healthiness. That’s it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you’re a little superior to other people. A kind of life-strength. An optimism about yourself that you generate almost at the expense of others. Don’t you sometimes feel this?” (Yes, as a matter of fact.) “There’s probably a German word for it. But the point I want to make is that this powerful feeling is so—I don’t know—delicate. That’s it. One day you feel it, the next day you are suddenly puny and doomed. A single little thing goes wrong, you feel doomed, you feel utterly weak and defeated and unable to act powerfully or even sensibly. Everyone else is lucky, you are unlucky, hapless, sad, ineffectual and doomed.

What happens to a highbrow literary culture when its fault lines-along caste, class and gender-are brutally exposed? What happens to the young iconoclasts who dare to speak and write about these issues openly? Is there such a thing as a happy ending for revolutionaries? Or are they doomed to be forever relegated to the footnotes of history? This is the never-before-told true story of the Hungry Generation (or 'the Hungryalists')-a group of barnstorming, anti-establishment poets, writers and artists in Bengal in the 1960s. Braving social boycott, ridicule and arrests, the Hungryalists changed the literary landscape of Bengal (and many South Asian countries) forever. Along the way, they also influenced iconic poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, who struck up a lifelong friendship with the Hungryalists.

In the years after The Fire Next Time, Baldwin openly questioned capitalism—even commending, with Bobby Seale, a “Yankee Doodle”–type socialism. He relentlessly criticized white supremacy, railed against U.S. imperialism, and prophesied the end of the West. In his open letter to Angela Davis in 1970, he succinctly summarized that politics: “We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have….The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation…means the beginning or the end of America

Thus it went on, each generation adding some flourish to the show; all men will seek honor, even victims doomed to death. It was thought nothing of, just to dodge the horns; you must make a graceful dance of it, and never look flurried or scared, but play the bull as if you loved him. And then, so Lukos says, came the golden age of the bull-dance. There was so much honor in it that the noblest and bravest of the Cretan youth did it for love, to win themselves a name and honor the god. That was the day of the first great bull-leapers; the day the songs are sung of. It is a good while back now, and the young lords and ladies have other pastimes. But sooner than lose the show, they brought in slaves to train. Even now, he says, a kind of glory sticks to a bull-dancer. They think the world of him, if he can keep alive.

Almost fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy made this appeal: 'Too many of us think [that peace] is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view ... Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions - on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process - a way of solving problems.' (Close quote.)

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

although the mission seemed doomed to fail, the four angels might succeed. He prayed also for Dallas Garner, the baby whose life hung in the balance. And for a generation who might never find redemption otherwise. FOUR EMPTY CHAIRS faced each other at the center of the adjacent room. Jag took the lead as they entered the space and shut the door behind them. Windows lined the walls, flooding the place with light and peace. When they were seated, Jag studied his peers. “Are you surprised?” Beck leaned back. Rays of sunshine streamed through the windows and flashed in his green eyes. He breathed deep, clearly bewildered. “Shocked.” “It’s true, we know the humans better.” Ember ran her hand over her long, golden-red hair. Concern knit itself into her expression. “But if they suspect us, it could alter their choices. We must be so very discreet.” Jag nodded. “Discretion will be key.” He planted his elbows on his knees, leaning closer to the others.

Gift am I, of Ferrol’s hand these laws to halt the chaos be, No king shall die, no tyrant cleaved save by the perilous sound of me. Cursed the silent hand that strikes forever to his brethren lost, Doomed of darkness and of light so be the tally and the cost. Breath upon my lips announce the gauntlet loud so all may hear, Thine challenge for the kingly seat so all may gather none need fear. But once upon a thousand three unless by death I shall cry, No challenge, no dispute proceed a generation left to die. Upon the sound, the sun shall pass and with the rising of the new, Combat will begin and last until there be but one of two. A bond formed betwixt opponents protected by Ferrol’s hand, From all save the blade, the bone, and skill of the other’s hand. Should champion be called to fight evoked is the Hand of Ferrol, Which protects the championed from all and champion from all—save one—from peril. Battle is the end for one for the other all shall sing. For when the struggle at last is done the victor shall be king

Diddy, not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. Like insecure tenants, never knowing exactly the extent of their property or when the lease will expire. Like unskilled cartographers, drawing and redrawing erroneous maps of an exotic continent. Eventually, for such a person, everything is bound to run dow. The walls sag. Empty spaces bulge between objects. The surfaces of objects sweat, thin out, buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams. Deploying things and navigating through space becomes laborious. Too much effort to amble from kitchen to living room, serving drinks, turning on the hi-fi, pretending to be cheerful . . . Everything running down: suffusing the whole of Diddy's well-tended life. Like a house powered by one large generator in the basement. Diddy has an almost palpable sense of the decline of the generator's energy. Or, of the monstrous malfunctioning of that generator, gone amok. Sending forth a torrent of refuse that climbs up into Diddy's life, cluttering all his floor space and overwhelming his pleasant furnishings, so that he's forced to take refuge. Huddle in a narrow corner. But however small the space Diddy means to keep free for himself, it won't remain safe. If solid material can't invade it, then the offensive discharge of the failing or rebellious generator will liquefy; so that it can travel everywhere, spread like a skin. The generator will spew forth a stream of crude oil, grimy and malodorous, that coats all things and persons and objects, the vulgar as well as the precious, the ugly as well as what little still remains beautiful. Befouling Diddy's world and rendering it unusable. Uninhabitable. This deliquescent running-down of everything becomes coexistent with Diddy's entire span of consciousness, undermines his most minimal acts. Getting out of bed is an agony unpromising as the struggles of a fish cast up on the beach, trying to extract life from the meaningless air. Persons who merely have a life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. But when this fluid evaporates, an uncensored, fetid, appalling underlife is disclosed. Lost continents are brought to view, bearing the ruins of doomed cities, the sparsely fleshed skeletons of ancient creatures immobilized in their death throes, a landscape of unparalleled savagery.

But self-mastery triumphs in this Modern Life of ours. So if we haven’t found happiness or calm or balance amidst it all - if we don’t cope - it’s because we’ve not tried hard enough. Because Modern Life dictates there’s an answer out there . . .you just have to try harder to find it and master it. Of course it doesn’t exist. So we are set up to fail. I feel for younger people. I think they’re hit particularly hard by this doomed imperative. Many sociologists peg increased anxiety among teens and young adults to this phenomenon. The standard solution is to consume - food, possessions, partners, gurus. If our self-worth is suffering, we’re told to buy a new moisturizer. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, writes, “We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.” Shia once again: “Today we’re told to do more stuff that has no purpose, which makes anxious.” Again, I think young people feel this acutely. And here’s the dirty clincher: All of it drives us outward, away from our true selves and fro our yearning to know ourselves better. Plus, it drives us away from each other. Lack of community and belonging is cited by Dr. Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - And More Miserable Than Ever Before, as the primary driver of anxiety today. I’d include extensive quotes from Dr. Twenge, but I think the book title says it all. Then (big sigh), when we do find it all too much, Modern Life slaps us with a “disorder” or disease diagnosis.

Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.

As they stand in the muck of the Cypress Swamp, black and thinly crusted, each Step breaking through to release a Smell of Generations of Deaths, something in it, some principle of untaught Mechanicks, tugging at their ankles, voiceless, importunate,— a moment arrives, when one of them smacks his Pate for something other than a Mosquitoe. “Ev’rywhere they’ve sent us,— the Cape, St. Helena, America,— what’s the Element common to all?” “Long Voyages by Sea,” replies Mason, blinking in Exhaustion by now chronick. “Was there anything else?” “Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,— more of it at St. Helena,— and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this public Secret, this shameful Core. . . . Pretending it to be ever somewhere else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies, down there, down where it smells like warm Brine and Gunpowder fumes, they’re murdering and dispossessing thousands untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily into the Hands of Slave-owners and Torturers, but oh, never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of Fools . . . ? Christ, Mason.” “Christ, what? What did I do?” “Huz. Didn’t we take the King’s money, as here we’re taking it again? whilst Slaves waited upon us, and we neither one objected, as little as we have here, in certain houses south of the Line,— Where does it end? No matter where in it we go, shall we find all the World Tyrants and Slaves? America was the one place we should not have found them.” “Yet we’re not Slaves, after all,— we’re Hirelings.” “I don’t trust this King, Mason. I don’t think anybody else does, either. Tha saw Lord Ferrers take the Drop at Tyburn. They execute their own. What may they be willing to do to huz?

A Presidential speech by a real President on Peace in the World John Kennedy 10th June 1963 “We need to examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But this is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that War is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man made and they therefore can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable. I am not here referring to the absolute and universal concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the values of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical more attainable goal—based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution of human institutions in a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single simple key to his peace—no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic not static, changing to meet the needs of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems. So let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct our attention to our common interests and the means by which these differences can be resolved, and if we now can not end our differences at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our childrens futures and we are all mortal.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

This, in turn, has given us a “unified theory of aging” that brings the various strands of research into a single, coherent tapestry. Scientists now know what aging is. It is the accumulation of errors at the genetic and cellular level. These errors can build up in various ways. For example, metabolism creates free radicals and oxidation, which damage the delicate molecular machinery of our cells, causing them to age; errors can build up in the form of “junk” molecular debris accumulating inside and outside the cells. The buildup of these genetic errors is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics: total entropy (that is, chaos) always increases. This is why rusting, rotting, decaying, etc., are universal features of life. The second law is inescapable. Everything, from the flowers in the field to our bodies and even the universe itself, is doomed to wither and die. But there is a small but important loophole in the second law that states total entropy always increases. This means that you can actually reduce entropy in one place and reverse aging, as long as you increase entropy somewhere else. So it’s possible to get younger, at the expense of wreaking havoc elsewhere. (This was alluded to in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mr. Gray was mysteriously eternally young. But his secret was the painting of himself that aged horribly. So the total amount of aging still increased.) The principle of entropy can also be seen by looking behind a refrigerator. Inside the refrigerator, entropy decreases as the temperature drops. But to lower the entropy, you have to have a motor, which increases the heat generated behind the refrigerator, increasing the entropy outside the machine. That is why refrigerators are always hot in the back. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said, “There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

Over a century now after Dr. William Gorgas wiped Yellow Fever out of Havana and Panama, and by that out of an entire continent, and more than half a century after Fred Lowe Soper led the eradication of Anopheles gambiae out of Northeast Brazil, their names are unknown, their carefully-detailed, boots-on-the-ground methods that they described in detail to leave expressly for generations to study and learn from to apply to malaria - and specifically they both had the desire for the destruction of malaria in Africa on their minds - is unread. The mistakes they warned about, the assumptions that they discovered to be useless and ineffectual in the field against disease-bearing mosquitoes are repeated today, while what Gorgas and Soper found to be effective and efficient in real-life conditions are routinely ignored or unknown, avoidable errors blithely doomed to be repeated thanks to modern ignorance of their incredibly important and transformative historical successes in public health. In the battles against malaria, to be ignorant of Gorgas’ and Soper's work in eradicating the mosquito that carries it is to be hobbled by the lack of hard-earned field knowledge, practical and effective discoveries that remain completely relevant and critical to success in eradicating malaria today.

Our economy is still reeling from the worst financial crisis in generations. Our jobless rate is too high and income growth is too low. But the U.S. recovery has outperformed expectations, history, and most of the developed world. So far, the prophets of doom who have predicted runaway inflation, runaway interest rates, a double-dip recession, a collapse in demand for U.S. government securities, and other horrors for America have been false prophets. I remember half-joking to the President that we had two types of critics attacking us for failing to produce a stronger recovery—people who were blocking our proposals to produce a stronger recovery, and people who believed in unicorns.

One night in 1987, Carmack saw the ultimate game. It occurred in the opening episode of a new television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the captain visited the ship’s Holodeck,

To make Star Wars, you’ve got to hate Star Wars”—this is a maxim I’ve heard from more than one veteran of Lucasfilm’s design department. What they mean is that if you’re too reverential about what came before, you’re doomed. You’ve got to be rebellious and questing. The franchise must constantly renew itself by pulling incongruous items out of a grab bag of outside influences, as Lucas himself did from the start. Likewise, fandom must constantly renew itself with new generations of viewers brought in by the prequels, by more recent additions to the canon like The Clone Wars and Rebels animated TV shows—and, soon enough, by the sequels to the first two trilogies.

Akbar's Rajput policy, however, did not result from any grand, premeditated strategy. Rather, it began as a response to the internal politics of one of the Rajput lineages, the Kachwaha clan, based in the state of Amber in northern Rajasthan. In 1534 the clan's head, Puran Man, died with no adult heir and was succeeded by his younger brother, Bharmal. Puran Mal, however, did have a son who by the early 1560s had come of age and challenged Bharmal's right to rule Amber. Feeling this pressure from within his own clan, Bharmal approached Akbar for material support, offering in exchange his daughter in marriage. The king agreed to the proposal. In 1562 the Kachwaha chieftain entered Mughal service, with Akbar assuring him of support in maintaining his position in the Kachwaha political order, while his family entered the royal household. Besides his daughter, Bharmal also sent his son Bhagwant Das and his grandson Man Singh (1550-1614) to the court in Agra. For several generations thereafter, the ruling clan continued to give its daughters to the Mughal court, thereby making the chiefs of these clans the uncles, cousins or even father-in-laws of Mughal emperors. The intimate connection between the two courts had far-reaching results. Not only did Kachwaha rulers quickly rise in rank and stature in the Mughal court, but their position within their own clan was greatly enhanced by Akbar's confirmation of their political leadership. Akbar's support also enhanced the position of the Kachwahas as a whole -- and hence Amber state -- in the hierarchy of Rajasthan's other Rajput lineages. Neighbouring clans soon realised the political wisdom of attaching themselves to the expanding Mughal state, a visibly rising star in North Indian politics. [...] Driving these arrangements, though, was not just the incentive of courtly patronage. The clans of Rajasthan well understood that refusal to engage with the Mughals would bring the stick of military confrontation. Alone among the Rajput clans, the Sisodiyas of Mewar in southern Rajasthan, north India's pre-eminent warrior lineages, obstinately refused to negotiate with the Mughals. In response, Akbar in 1568 led a four-month siege of the Sisodiyas' principal stronghold of Chittor, which ultimately fell to the Mughals, but only after a spectacular 'jauhar' in which the fort's defenders, foreseeing their doom, killed their women and gallantly sallied forth to meet their deaths. In all, some 30,000 defenders of the fort were killed, although its ruler, Rana Pratap, managed to escape. For decades, he and the Sisodiya house would continue to resist Mughal domination, whereas nearly every other Rajput lineage had acknowledged Mughal overlordship.

I believe that there is a Maslovian hierarchy of fires that applies to most rapidly growing start-ups, where the top of the list is the most important fire to fight first: Distribution Product Revenue model Operations Competition What’s next? What this means is that for most consumer Internet start-ups, the most important fire is distribution; if your distribution goes up in flames, your company is doomed. If you are able to contain that fire, however, it will make fighting the other fires a whole lot easier. Acquiring users gives you feedback on how to improve your product. Acquiring millions of users or thousands of customers makes it a lot easier to generate revenue. Generating revenue makes it easier to pay for the infrastructure and personnel to scale up your operations, either out of cash flow or by raising investment. And if you have a successful and growing business, then it makes sense to worry about the competition.

Don’t you think we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of our parents?” “No. Aren’t we supposed to be trying to do better than the generations before us? Fix their mistakes, don’t pass along their trauma? Give ourselves the best possible shot at life? If your dad is a terrible husband, then you can be better than him. Be committed.

Human beings can apparently endure an amazing amount of misery as long as there is hope; but neurotic entanglements invariably generate a measure of hopelessness, and the more severe the entanglements the greater the hopelessness. It may be deeply buried: superficially the neurotic may be preoccupied with imagining or planning conditions that would make things better. If only he were married, had a larger apartment, a different foreman, a different wife; if only she were a man, a little older or younger, a little taller or not so tall—then everything would be all right. And sometimes the elimination of certain disquieting factors really does prove helpful. More often, however, such hopes merely externalize inner difficulties and are doomed to disappointment. The neurotic expects a world of good from external changes, but inevitably carries himself and his neurosis into each new situation.

The insula can transmit signals to the amygdala that trigger fight/flight responses. This does not require any cognitive input or any conscious recognition that something has gone awry—you just feel on edge and unable to focus or, at worst, have a sense of imminent doom. These powerful feelings are generated deep inside the brain and cannot be eliminated by reason or understanding.

This does not require any cognitive input or any conscious recognition that something has gone awry—you just feel on edge and unable to focus or, at worst, have a sense of imminent doom. These powerful feelings are generated deep inside the brain and cannot be eliminated by reason or understanding.

When I asked a Portuguese mathematician of my acquaintance whether he had any insight to offer me on the subject, he replied, “The foundations of mathematics are full of holes and I never felt comfortable dealing with such things.” Full of holes. Earlier generations of mathematicians assumed that the stability of the landscape on which mathematical structures were built was guaranteed by God or nature. They strode in like pioneers or surveyors, their task to map the fundamentals and in so doing secure the territory that future generations would colonize. But then the holes—of which the liar’s paradox is merely one—started popping up, and the mathematicians started falling in. Never mind! Each hole could be plugged. But soon enough another would open, and another, and another . . . Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spoke for any number of idealistic mathematicians when he wrote in 1907, The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws, is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole: to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction, this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation: like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveller ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately storeys of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part. I remember that when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college, I was particularly fascinated by the character of Mr. Casaubon, whose lifework was a Key to All Mythologies that he could never finish. If Mr. Casaubon’s Key was doomed to incompletion, my astute professor observed, it was at least in part because “totalizing projects,” by their very nature, ramify endlessly; they cannot hope to harness the multitude of tiny details demanded by words like “all,” just as they cannot hope to articulate every generalization to which their premises (in this case, the idea that all mythologies have a single key) give rise. Perhaps without realizing it, my professor was making a mathematical statement—she was asserting the existence of both the infinite and the infinitesimal—and her objections to Mr. Casaubon’s Key hold as well for any number of attempts on the part of mathematicians to establish a Key to All Mathematics.

The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma - Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.

Durant mes années de lycée, lorsque je discutais avec un chrétien, un musulman ou un juif, j’avais toujours eu la sensation que leur croyance était à prendre en quelque sorte au second degré ; qu’ils ne croyaient évidemment pas, directement et au sens propre, à la réalité des dogmes proposés, mais qu’il s’agissait d’un signe de reconnaissance, d’une sorte de mot de passe leur permettant l’accès à la communauté des croyants – un peu comme aurait pu le faire la grunge music, ou Doom Generation pour les amateurs de ce jeu. Le sérieux pesant qu’ils apportaient parfois à débattre entre des positions théologiques également absurdes semblait aller à l’encontre de cette hypothèse ; mais il en allait de même, au fond, pour les véritables amateurs d’un jeu : pour un joueur d’échecs, ou un participant réellement immergé dans un jeu de rôles, l’espace fictif du jeu est une chose en tous points sérieuse et réelle, on peut même dire que rien d’autre n’existe pour lui, pendant la durée du jeu tout du moins.

Most people associate the Nazis with book burning. Everyone has seen on television or the Internet the Dantesque images of students throwing hundreds of books into the fire in the streets and squares of German cities in the 1930s. True funeral pyres of Western civilization, they were a barbaric prelude to the burning of human beings, exactly as the German poet Heinrich Heine described in a visionary way. Much less well-known is the meticulous looting carried out by the Nazis in libraries throughout Europe. Prior to my conversation with Albert, I had heard something about it, but was unaware of both the reasons why this massive theft had taken place or of its size. While the theft of a work of art is usually done out of artistic passion or simple greed, what could have driven the Nazis to transport tons of books in train wagons across Europe? And it was not a selective exercise, no—the books were taken in bulk without any sorting. That is, they were removed without prior knowledge of their value. One particularly striking fact explains the Nazi regime’s interest in Jewish books. According to one of its most influential ideologues, Alfred Rosenberg, it was important for future generations to know the enemy after their final defeat. That is why public and private Jewish libraries were ransacked throughout Europe to fill the shelves of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. In the eyes and most delirious dreams of the Nazis, it was a research institute dedicated to studying a people that was doomed to extinction.

All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life, but those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionally more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man, that we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.

Every day, experts bombard us with predictions, but how reliable are they? Until a few years ago, no one bothered to check. Then along came Philip Tetlock. Over a period of ten years, he evaluated 28,361 predictions from 284 self-appointed professionals. The result: In terms of accuracy, the experts fared only marginally better than a random forecast generator. Ironically, the media darlings were among the poorest performers; and of those, the worst were the prophets of doom and disintegration.

The loss of faith in marriage explains why my generation may be so zealous about making sure their marriages are so equal: A modern couple's desire to keep their arrangement strictly balanced, at all levels, is actually a way of protecting each partner's self-interest in the event that the marriage dissolves. The compromises a couple is willing to make for each other, the responsibilities the partners are willing to shoulder for their family, are bearable only if they can be assured that their marriage is going to last and that the society around them considers an enduring marriage important - indeed, worthwhile and admirable. A man stays in a marriage not simply because he loves his wife and children, but because he could not respect himself - or expect others to respect him - if he casually up and left, or had an affair, or brought harm to those who so deeply loved and trusted him. Likewise for a woman. She stays in a marriage and takes risks like leaving her job when the babies are born not because she finds changing diapers so intrinsically interesting or doing the laundry so fulfilling but because she feels it is right for her family. If a couple is uncertain that their marriage will last - or even that it's important for it to last - and each partner does not respect the sacrifices the other is making, then it will be difficult for them to make any compromises at all. They will cling to their individuality out of self-protection, constantly thinking about their own long-term self-interest, unable to think or act in terms of what is good for the family as a whole. A couple who enters marriage with this attitude is doomed, no matter what hopeful sentiments they may express for each other at the altar.

We are often reminded that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and I believe deeply in the truth of that sentiment. Few things are as vital as remembering and passing on history to future generations.

2016, the most scandalous and tumultuous election season of my generation. On the national stage, the two presidential candidates were strangely similar. They both had remarkable wealth, a litany of personal scandals, and a disturbing ability to stir up pure hatred in their opponents. The media rejoiced. Nothing produced more dramatic headlines than these two people. In the meantime, I was furious. There was so much coverage of them, each of whom were purporting to be good leaders. There was also an unceasing cry of doom and fear from all sides. Above all, I was most angry that for some it wouldn’t matter all that much who got elected. We who are economically stable would figure out a way to preserve our interests. But for the most vulnerable among us—the unborn, the poor, single mothers, immigrants, refugees, minorities, prisoners—it would matter a lot. Unfortunately, it would happen in different ways depending on which candidate was elected. But the news wasn’t about the people who would bear the brunt of our broken politics. It was about politicians as celebrities and the salacious details of their lives of sex, money, and power.

As Alford justly remarks: ‘John is now speaking in the true character of a prophet foretelling the wrath soon to be poured on the Jewish nation,’ hh So with the other representations in the address of the Baptist; all is indicative of the swift approach of destruction. ‘Already the axe was lying at the root of the trees.’ The ‘winnowing shovel’ was actually in the hands of the Husbandman; the sifting process was about to begin. These warnings of John the Baptist are not the vague and indefinite exhortations to repentance, addressed to men in all ages, which they are sometimes assumed to be; they are urgent, burning words, having a specific and present bearing upon the then existing generation, the living men to whom he brought the message of God. The Jewish nation was now upon its last trial; the second Elijah had come as the precursor of ‘the great and dreadful day of the Lord:’ if they rejected his warnings, the doom predicted by Malachi would surely and speedily follow; ‘I will come and smite the land with the curse.’ Nothing can be more obvious than that the catastrophe to which John alludes is particular, national, local, and imminent, and history tells us that within the period of the generation that listened to his warning cry, ‘the wrath came upon them to the uttermost.

This was why the band emerged as such heroes. Not only had they behaved dutifully and without apparent concern for their own safety, but they also offered the hope that not all of the younger male generation were venial, lazy, proud, irreligious, inconsiderate, self-indulgent, weak-willed, and timorous. The example of the band suggested that the doom mongers may have got it wrong because, unlike soldiers, they hadn’t trained to face danger and had come straight to the deck from the heart of early-twentieth-century splendor and luxury. If eight random men could display such strength of character in unison on the spur of the moment, the chances were that any other eight men randomly selected would react in the same way.

There exists in nature an intensely impassioned drive to survive that exceeds any passion capable of being generated by an existence that itself is doomed to extinction.

Is each generation doomed to unwittingly repeat the sins of the last? I wanted to know, and I might’ve asked, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever raise with Pa. Or Grandpa. So I put it out of my mind and tried to focus on the good.

But it’s not just the bloodline, Penellaphe. We were warned about you long ago. It was written in the bones of your namesake before the gods went to sleep,” Alastir said. My skin pimpled. “‘With the last Chosen blood spilled, the great conspirator birthed from the flesh and fire of the Primals will awaken as the Harbinger and the Bringer of Death and Destruction to the lands gifted by the gods. Beware, for the end will come from the west to destroy the east and lay waste to all which lies between.’” I stared at him in stunned silence. “You are the Chosen, birthed of the flesh and fire of the gods. And you come from the west, to the lands the gods have gifted,” Alastir conferred. “You are who your namesake warned about.” “You…you’re doing all of this because of my bloodline and a prophecy?” A harsh laugh rattled from me. There had been old wives’ tales about prophecies and tales of doom in every generation. They were nothing but fables. “You don’t have to believe me, but I knew—I think I always did.” He frowned as his eyes narrowed slightly. “I sensed it when I looked into your eyes for the first time. They were old. Primal. I saw death in your eyes, even all those years ago.”  My heart stuttered and then sped up. “What?” “We met before. You were either too young then to remember or the events of the night were too traumatic,” Alastir said, and every part of me flashed hot and then cold. “I didn’t realize it was you when I saw you for the first time in New Haven. I thought you looked familiar, and it kept nagging at me. Something about your eyes. But it wasn’t until you said your parents’ names that I knew exactly who you were. Coralena and Leopold. Cora and her lion.” I jolted, feeling as if the floor of the crypt had moved under me. I couldn’t speak. “I lied to you,” he said softly. “When I said that I would ask to see if any others had known of them or had potentially tried to help them escape to Atlantia, I never planned to ask anyone. I didn’t need to because it was me.” Heart pounding fast, I snapped out of my stupor. “You were there that night? The night the Craven attacked the inn?” He nodded as the torches flickered behind him. A picture of my father formed in my mind, his features hazy as he kept glancing out the window of the inn, looking and searching for something or someone. Later that night, he’d said to someone who lingered in the shadows of my mind, “This is my daughter.” I couldn’t…I couldn’t breathe as I stared at Alastir. His voice. His laugh. It had always sounded so familiar to me. I’d thought it reminded me of Vikter. I’d been wrong. “I came to meet them, give them safe passage,” he said, his voice growing weary.

The Spark, the animating spirit of the early warrior caste, is distinct from the religion that comes to predominate and maintain the later multiethnic empire, which I will call The Imperial Altar. Civilisational successes—such as conquest, wealth, and education—generate their own loss conditions. The Barbarism of Reflection destroys the foundations of the Imperial Altar and successfully kills any last remnants of The Spark. The castes of the lion archetype (warriors and peasants) have mutual antagonisms with the castes of the fox archetype (priests or intellectuals and merchants). Where the lion archetype predominates either as monarchism (warriors) or as Caesarism (peasants) ‘civilisational successes’ can be held in check for a period. They tend to create strong regimes through ruthlessness but such strength, ironically, leads to the managerial need for administration generated by growth and complexity, which in turn leads to the rise of elites of the fox archetype taking over. When the fox archetype predominates, either as theocracy (priests/intellectuals) or plutarchy (merchants), ‘civilisational success’ may accelerate but, in the process, the very foundations that facilitated such success in the first place (i.e. the strong regime maintained by the lion’s ruthlessness) are eroded, eventually leading to collapse. Quantity has a quality all of its own, which manifests as all that is ‘mass’: democracy, utilitarianism, standardisation, and the destruction of quality and distinction. This is a feature of the late, pre-collapse cycle. Individuals of one civilisational season cannot embody the spirit of another: the Children of Winter, for example, cannot embody the Spring. Civilisation is incommunicable. The ‘world-feeling’ of a people as Spengler says is ‘not transferable’. ‘What one people takes over from another—in “conversion” or in admiring feeling—is a name, dress, and mask for its own feeling, never the feeling of that other.’[1] Ethnicity is a constant reality which promotes ingroup solidarity in the early cycle and becomes a problem for the ruling class to manage in the late cycle.

Spengler’s notion of pseudomorphosis finds its parallel when he says, ‘Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but … they will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.

Change comes in the form of repetition. We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two, in any case. It’s been so in the

Without accurate depictions of our front lines, reliable information with which to make strategic decisions, and—most importantly—veracious details to document our history for the good of future generations, we’re doomed, not only as a kingdom but as a society.

Whether the future is wonderful or terrible is, in part, up to us.” “But just as the world does not stop at our doorstep or our country’s borders, neither does it stop with our generation, or the next.” ― William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future But, If we are to be responsible for the future then how could we not be responsible for our own past? Accepting historical truths has nothing to do with "personal responsibility" but historical responsibility is definitely a thing we must accept to even have a future that isn't doomed to repeat its horrid past...

This is the story of how it all unraveled again for Hillary. We expect that it will generate a feeling of righteousness, and perhaps a touch of sympathy, in those of you who don’t like her. For many of Hillary’s millions of supporters, we know that it will leave you feeling shattered all over again.

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind’s prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind’s unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people’s tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind’s plaintive subsistence.

IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.

My personal analysis is that the media have made the AI-safety debate seem more controversial than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to proclaim imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones.

For instance, is fear ever a legitimate response to crisis? Is there any truth at all to fear? In my experience, fear is an Ego feeling out of control. In times of true crisis, there’s no time for fear, only action. It’s only thinking about it afterwards or anticipating it, that we feel fear. Also, one of the qualities of being in the presence of truth is its accompanying energy of fearlessness. Are fear, gloom and doom, attempting to control, empowered responses? As the world heats up literally and figuratively, it’s time to learn how to better handle our emotional energies during times of crisis and change. In my experience, most of our emotional responses to crisis is not usually about the event, but another one. This applies to collective events, where I consistently witness people going into fear and “concern” spirals for days on end. Ditto for building stories about “dark times”. I expect this will make me unpopular, but here goes: If you’re having an emotion about a catastrophe that lasts longer than a few minutes, and you’re not bringing food and supplies, or in it, it’s probably about something else. Either conditioning you’ve inherited from the collective, like a Pavlovian response that says “okay, when this type of event happens we get sad/fearful/despairing/bitter. Ok, now go!,” or it’s a deeper wound of your own being triggered, or you’re not grounded and centered in your own energy. If it’s not happening to you, it’s not personal. It is what is. Don’t generate more Ego energy for the collective by dwelling in disaster. Either find a way to help, pitch in if that’s your thing, or connect with your light. Either benefit all. For the Empaths who feel everything, I love what Martha Beck says. When she witnesses someone going through something tough, to avoid taking it on, in a nutshell she says, ‘This is their journey. I’ll have my time to go through xyz, but now is not my time. Everyone gets their time.’ Don’t worry, you’ll have your time to feel your own personal crisis or tragedy. Won’t you want people who are strong in their light around? Joining in with another’s or the world’s misery helps no one. It only creates more fear and misery. If you’re not baking someone a cake, better to ground, root and center. Take a walk in nature. Listen to uplifting music. Focus on your furthering your calling. The fact is: the more focus we place on external events, feeding them with fearful thoughts and “concern”, the more distracted we become from our internal reality, where, with awareness, we can liberate our self -which benefits everyone. Once we stop the fear and warring within our selves we are able to be inspired and take action from a place of grace, not from absorbing external fear energies or being mired in our own wounding. When we run on old fear conditioning- that it’s a dangerous, scary world; we’re ill-equipped for survival; we’re weak and can’t change; other people are doing this horrible thing to us- we are not only denying our light so weakening our selves, but we are not being honest. We are powerful. We are eternal. We are in charge of our experience. When we own our light it benefits everyone.

Are you private, or are you in fact working for Scotland Yard?” “Neither. I am a social investigator.” “I see,” I said, though to be frank, I didn’t. “I don’t suppose that pays very well.” “Nothing at all, actually, but it’s very important. That’s why I am working in the East End. I wish to know why the greatest empire in history cannot feed, clothe, or shelter many of its people. I wonder why the mistakes and attitudes of one generation are doomed to be repeated in the next and why the arrival of a people with a rich and ancient culture such as the Jews inspires fear and loathing among an otherwise sensible people.